OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was not pleased with Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads making fun of ChatGPT. But it seems they did the job that OpenAI’s arch-rival Anthropic intended to. According to data analyzed by BNP Paribas, the maker of the Claude chatbot Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% following its Super Bowl advertisement that made fun of rival OpenAI’s decision to bring ads to ChatGPT. As per the report, the Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and artificial intelligence competitors OpenAI, Google Gemini and Meta. Daily active users also reportedly saw an 11% jump post-game, the most significant among AI companies. OpenAI’s ChatGPT had a 2.7% bump in daily active users after the Super Bowl and Gemini added 1.4%. But what is important to note here is that Claude’s user base is still much smaller than ChatGPT and Gemini.Advertisements from artificial intelligence brands took center stage at the big game, which brought in an audience of 125 million in the U.S., as platforms made their pitch to lure more customers in a competitive market that’s showing no signs of slowing.Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads that mae un of OpenAI for showing adsAnthropic spent millions of dollars on ads during America’s National Football League championship game to slam rival OpenAI for its plan to sell ads on its ChatGPT. Anthropic’s 30-second ads took a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI’s intentions to introduce ads in ChatGPT. The punchline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” the name of Anthropic’s chatbot.

Sam Altman called Anthropic’s ads ‘clearly dishonest’

Not surprisingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was not happy with Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad campaign. In a post to social media platform X, formerly, Twitter, Altman called the commercials “deceptive” and “clearly dishonest.”Here’s what Sam Altman wrote in his 400-word long note on Anthropic adsFirst, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don’t show you ads.)Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.One authoritarian company won’t get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything.We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win.We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users.This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.